Can You Pass the Home Kitchen Safety Test?

Imagine this: you're making meatloaf in your kitchen and just as you're about to begin mushing all the ingredients together in the bowl, a city health inspector enters the room and begins opening your cupboards and your refrigerator, taking notes all the while. Occasionally, he mutters something as he shakes his head. Finally, he wanders over to where you've been working and peers into the bowl and then, disapprovingly, scribbles another note.

As it happens, Americans could do a far better job of practicing food safety in their own kitchens if a report in last week's Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report from the Centers for Disease Control is any indication.

Food-borne illnesses are "an important cause" of death in the United States, according to the report and significant number of those illnesses actually stem from the home kitchen, your kitchen. The MMWR story examined the results of an online quiz posted on the web site of the Los Angeles County Health Department and geared toward the home cook. The results are eye opening.

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First posted in 2006, the quiz takes readers on a tour through their kitchens, asking whether they keep accurate thermometers in their refrigerators, how they store raw and precooked foods, and whether they remove jewelry from their hands before they begin cooking. Actually, the quiz asks far more than that, even inquiring about the state of your household plumbing and whether you sterilize your kitchen sponge every day. All in all, of the approximately 13,000 adults who completed the quiz over a period stretching from 2006 to 2008, only 34 percent of those passed with an "A" (Los Angeles uses a letter-grade system for its health inspections).

The report goes on to say that 27 percent received "a B, 25 percent a C, and 14 percent received a numeric score because they scored lower than 70 percent on the self-assessment."

Nationwide, nearly 90 million people experience some form of food-related illness but those numbers are hard to pin down. As the CDC points out, the nature and types of food-borne illnesses change over time. One hundred years ago, typhoid, cholera, and tuberculosis were the most common forms of food-related illnesses. With advances in food safety technology such as pasteurization, those diseases are rarely issues for us today. Now, it's Salmonella and E. Coli. New technologies bring us even more awareness about the causes of illnesses mistakenly attributed to other sources and – in many cases – we're being confronted with illnesses we've simply never encountered before.

Once you've taken the tests, think back to all those times your little angels complained of upset tummies or were simply out-and-out and sick and no one was quite sure where they might have contracted whatever they were sick with. Now ask yourself this: Is your kitchen as safe as it could be?